Lloyd Kahn is the editor-in-chiefof Shelter Publications, an independent California publisher.Shelter Publications specializes in books on buildingand architecture,as well as health and fitness.Lloyds latest book is Tiny Homes on the Move: Wheels and Water.For more info, see: www.shelterpub.comLloyd Kahn is the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, an independent California publisher. Shelter Publications specializes in books on building and architecture, as well as health and fitness. Lloyd’s latest book is Builders of the Pacific Coast. For more info, see: www.shelterpub.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/lloydkahn

From an article (long one) in yesterday's The Observer, by Carole Cadwalladr, here. Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images

"…But then, it's almost impossible, to flick through the pages of the Catalog and recapture its newness and radicalism and potentialities. Not least because the very idea of a book changing the world is just so old-fashioned. Books don't change anything these days. If you want to start a revolution, you'd do it on Facebook. And so many of the ideas that first reached a mainstream audience in the Catalog – organic farming, solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing, mountain bikes, midwife-assisted birth, female masturbation, computers, electronic synthesizers – are now simply part of our world, that the ones that didn't go mainstream (communes being a prime example) rather stand out.…

"It changed the world, says Turner, in much the same way that Google changed the world: it made people visible to each other. And while the computer industry was building systems to link communities of scientists, the Catalog was a 'vernacular technology" that was doing the same thing.…

"John Markoff, who wrote What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, says, simply: 'Stewart was the first one to get it. He was the first person to understand cyberspace. He was the one who coined the term personal computer. And he influenced an entire generation, including an entire generation of technologists'.…

"Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, tells me how he first came across the Catalog when he was still in high school 'and it changed my life. But then it changed everybody's life. It inspired me not to go to college but to go and try and live out my own life. It was like being given permission to invent your own life. That was what the Catalog did. It was called "access to tools" and it gave you tools to create your own education, your own business, your own life'.…"Sent us by Vic Long

5
comment
s:

I found the Whole Earth Catalog as a southern Indiana high school sophomore. It was just laying around the Ecology Lab so I took it home. I didn't sleep that night. That was forty three years ago. It was something special, in a cosmic (yet earthy) way. Everything about it was right. It gave me...hope.

I first picked up The Whole Earth Catalog one evening in 1972, and my mother and I were at a friend's house for dinner. I was 11 years old. Our friend noticed I was a bit bored, and suggested I "look through this neat book I have" with a knowing smile.... And that was it. My mind was blown. Expanded is the better word, actually. I spent the whole evening glued to that thing. She wouldn't let me take the catalogs home with me, but invited me to return whenever I wanted to read some more. I did, often. For my 16th birthday, she GAVE them to me. What a wonderful gift. Years later I passed them down to another young boy, remembering that first evening with the same knowing smile.